The controversial proposal of a “lifelong” marriage revealed one thing, among others, about its author, Culture Minister Jehlička: He has never read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
The scandalized proposal of a “lifelong” marriage revealed one thing, among others, about its author, Culture Minister Jehlička: He has never read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
Maybe he remembers the novel’s synopsis from when he was a schoolboy: A married woman falls in love with another man and jumps under a moving train. The minister certainly knows that she jumped under the train, but he has probably never searched for the reason why she did it. Her husband Karenin refused to give his consent to a divorce for which she had repeatedly asked him. That is how it went in the 19th century: A divorce was granted, but one had to ask for it.
Anna’s tragic story must have left a permanent impression on an attentive reader and shown him the dark side of an involuntary union between two people, the rules of which are determined by society. The minister therefore cannot have read Anna Karenina. Or maybe he did, but he thought to himself that the unfaithful woman deserved such a fate. In any case, the ludicrous amendment to the civil code revealed something strange: the 19th-century museum of ideas that Jehlička preserves in his head.
What would this contract agreed upon by fiancés as a replacement of regular marriage, what would this insurance, this “lifelong marriage sentence” mean? In the future it would be no longer suffice that one of the partners is dissatisfied and wants a divorce. On the contrary: The dissatisfied individual, who is, in fact, subverting the marriage, would have (like Karenina) nothing to say about it. The “culprit” would be left at the “innocent’s” mercy. Nobody would ask the guilty one. Their partner would be the one who would decide, whether he agrees with the divorce or not.
The minister probably meant well: He aimed to increase the prestige of the institution of marriage and prevent unnecessary divorces. But the effect would be completely the opposite; In light of similar regulations, it is only the absurd nature of marriage as such that comes to the surface.
Such amendment, however, could bring even something positive: For example, along with forced coexistence, the era of great social novels could return.
Translated with permission by the Prague Daily Monitor
